Echoes of Tattered Tongues: Memory Unfolded

Tuesday, November 2, 2021

All Souls’ Day

When I was a kid in the 50s growing up in Chicago, All Souls Day – the day set aside to commemorate the faithful who’ve died — wasn’t a big deal.

I went to St. Fidelis, a Catholic parish near Humboldt Park, and even though the parish was pretty much made up of Poles and Polish Americans, All Souls Day didn’t seem like it was anything special. A mass was said that day that all the school kids had to go to, but we had to go to mass every school day. Sure, the priest would mention the dead at the service on All Souls Day, but beyond that there wasn’t anything different. Not that I could see.

But in Poland it was apparently different. At least that’s what my parents used to say. They would tell me stories about what it was like All Souls Day in Poland when they were kids.

People, my mother would tell me, would first have a really special dinner. There would be kasza and other ceremonial foods, and there would even be special plates set aside for the family members who had died. Then, the family would walk to the cemetery where their mothers and fathers, their sisters and brothers, were buried. Candles would be lit there by the graves. I asked my mom once why they did that. She told me the people who lit the candles hoped the light from them would lead the souls of the departed back to their families and homes here among the living. Sometimes at night, there would be so many candles burning on and near the graves that you could see the light shining above the cemeteries as you walked back home, even if your home was far away.

But we didn’t do that in America. We were immigrants, Displaced Persons and refugees, and all our dead were buried far away in Poland and the parts of Poland that are now the Ukraine. My mother didn’t even know where her mother and her sister and her sister’s baby were buried. The men who killed them put my mother on a boxcar and sent her to the slave labor camps in Germany before she could bury her family. When my mom returned to her hometown west of Lwow 40 years after the war, no one could even tell her where her mom and her sister and the baby were buried.

Growing up, I didn’t hear much about my mom’s dead or my dad’s dead. We didn’t commemorate them. Maybe the past and those who died in it was just filled with too much sorrow for my parents to try to commemorate.

A little while ago, the Polish poet Oriana Ivy now living in California — author of the books April Snow and From the New World — sent me a poem about the fog in Warsaw and how she imagines it’s the war dead coming back. She writes, “Warsaw has a lot of fog, especially in autumn — which is very ‘atmospheric,’ as we used to say — lyrical, poetic — and of course all those plaques marking the places of mass executions — you could say that it’s a haunted city.”

Here’s the poem:

All Souls

Sometimes I think Warsaw fog

is the dead, coming back

to seek their old homes –

wanting to touch even the walls.

But they cannot find those walls,

so they embrace the trees instead,

lindens and enduring chestnuts.

They embrace the whole city, lay

their arms around the bridges

and the droplet-beaded street lamps;